12/17/2008 @ 12:00AM

You Like Us! But Not For Long

In the weeks since Barack Obama and his family walked out on that Grant Park stage, our euphoria about the world’s euphoria must surely count as the most endearingly silly outcome of this election.

It started the moment the election was called. Looking flushed, Charlie Rose turned for proof of our assured global redemption after the horrors of the Bush years to that grande French talking tête, Bernard-Henri Lévy. The Parisian in the open white dress shirt, made to order casual from London without half the buttons sewn on, loved right back.

News from overseas fed the excitement. The birthplace of Obama Père, Kenya, declared a national holiday. Western Europeans, the Chinese and Russians (the people if not their rulers), even that fabled Arab Street, all seemed to rejoice. So many of us have heard from family and friends overseas awed–as Bill Clinton once said–by the “mystery of American renewal.” A black man, the son of a foreigner, a virtual unknown a mere four years ago, rose to the highest office on the planet. Only in America, they say, What a country! They mean it, and they’re right.

Of course, Andrew Sullivan told us it would be so on the cover of last December’s Atlantic–and subsequently told us, repeatedly, that he’d told us that “Obama matters” because the world will see us differently. He has plenty of company in the commentariat and among (admittedly) Democratic politicians. All together, they channel Gidget: “You like me, right now, you like me!” I imagine Sally Field (of 1985 Oscar ceremony fame) partakes fully in the Obama-as-America’s-salvation-overseas mania, though I haven’t bothered to ask.

One hates to spoil a good party, but here’s a bet that’s far safer these days than a U.S. Treasury bill: Even with Obama at the White House, they won’t really like us any more than before.

It’s not because America’s not a special country, a City upon a Hill, from the Pilgrims to Obama, the Blagojevich couple and other American horrors notwithstanding. It’s because it is. And as ever, our earnest assertion of our superior ontological uniqueness–not to mention its reality in and of itself–is exactly what always grated on the unfriendlies grouped together under the banner of anti-Americanism.

The past few years for sure were especially happy ones for the flag burners, intellectual bomb throwers and suicide attackers. George W. Bush gave this crowd a great excuse to hate America–and the Democrats a highly effective partisan political weapon against the ruling party.

At home, Bush played well into the favored narrative of an America Lost. Namely, that this administration squandered all that good will overseas we earned after 9/11. But remember how the good will was earned, and from whom. Everyone loves to cite Le Monde’s opening editorial line that day, “Today we’re all Americans!” I was in Paris that day. Here’s what I read: “Today, when that arrogant colossus across the sea lies prostrate and bloodied and humbled, we’re all Americans, but let them stay down or …”

Le Monde, conveniently for our purposes, means “the world”–in this case the one that turned against the U.S. from the moment the country pulled itself up. (The joyous Palestinians, and the quiet glee from Havana to Tehran and over to Beijing, showed that some people never got the message about “good will;” in any case, it soon didn’t matter.)

I recall all too well the anti-war protests in Paris and Brussels against the U.S. attack on … Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, supposedly the good war. By the time Iraq rolled around, Jacques Chirac (a right-wing French nationalist) and the BHL/Le Monde left stood drunk together against the U.S. (To his credit, BHL fought against the idiocies of the anti-American brigades arguably with more fervor than the Iraq war itself.) The streets of Western European capitals filled with hundreds of thousands of America bashers. Our popularity polls–otherwise known as trans-Atlantic opinion surveys done by outfits such as Pew and the German Marshall Fund–plummeted. In reality, America’s real friends stuck by America throughout–such as most European governments, most of Eastern Europe and chunks of Asia and Africa. They got little attention; it didn’t fit the narrative.

The departure of George Bush will change the mood music in America’s relations with the world, but–here’s the heartbreaker for our romantics–it won’t change how most people see America. Because, for “anti” masses, it’s not really about us; it’s about them.

In this huge and diverse church that groups together the wacky nationalists from Turkey, China and Russia, Western Europe’s racist xenophobes and neo-Marxists, the Islamists and other crazies, various stripes of Latin Americans, and everyone in between, America is a useful enemy to nurture. There’s never been any good will there. Hence no one should hold their breaths for any forthcoming.

Let’s consider the Parisian variety: Anti-Americanism dates back to the 19th century, though the word itself didn’t enter the French language until the 1940s and the dictionary in 1968. No other nation’s name gets coupled with “anti” in French. The phenomenon grew with intensity the bigger and stronger America became after World War II and the end of the Cold War, and the weaker France, a former proud power, became. For the French, and virtually everyone else, when anything goes wrong, most especially in their own house, the easy way is to blame Big Guy.

What’s puzzling is that we care this much what these people think. Like a teenage girl at a new school, Americans desperately want to be liked. Last year, on the eve of the 3/11 train attacks anniversary, former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar told me that power makes America, the Rome of our times, a target of so much criticism. His message: It comes with the territory; get over it. The other day in London, the historian Andrew Roberts remarked, “We didn’t give a toss what anyone thought when we ran the world.”

Fair points both, I think. Yet America is different from those past empires, and I find our thin skin winning–to a point. The place attracts the hatred of assorted masses from London fine-dining table to the caves around Tora Bora because it is attractive at so many levels and isn’t self-consciously a global Empire (which enrages some people even more). Our iPods, Harvards and Stanfords, Tiger Woodses and Michael Phelpses, Beyoncés and Philip Roths all constitute American power along with the dollar and the military.

Above all, the country exists as an idea, and remains, Fareed Zakariaesque attestations to our decline and the rise of a post-American monde to the contrary, as alluring (and galling) as ever. Barack Obama may offer that a “new dawn of American leadership is at hand.” But he and his electoral success are products of a culture of near limitless possibility that was here from the founding of the Republic; something always envied and admired by others. For better and for worse, that won’t change.

Matthew Kaminski is a member of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board.